Fascinated

by Fascinated (retail) (epub)

  Frank stares, transfixed, as the jaws pull apart and the face erupts with an anguished roar. And then he has turned and is running away through the undergrowth with Valentine beside him. The creepers whip at his throat and wrists, trying to snare him and pull him down. A moth, like an angry homunculus, batters itself against his face. Behind them Conrad comes rushing on long, elastic legs.

  They have found their clothes and are scrambling to dress when the hunter erupts through the jungle and stands before them, terrible in his nylon nightie, a pruning knife and a brandy bottle trembling in his fists.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking!’ shrieks Valentine, fighting with the buttons on her dress.

  But Conrad’s thoughts are too dark and deep to be fathomed. He turns to Frank and fixes him with a long stare, closing one eye and shaking the brandy bottle at him. ‘I’ve been watching you,’ he whispers, flicking his tongue around his teeth. ‘I’ve seen the way you look at my daughter. I’ve seen the way you’ve been trying to get your hand up her skirt while your feet were under my dinner table. I trusted you, Frank. I brought you into my home. I made you one of the family.’

  ‘If you trusted him why the hell were you creeping around in the bushes!’ shouts Valentine, dancing from foot to foot as she tries to fit her shoes. The dress snags and twists on her hips.

  ‘Silence!’ roars Conrad. ‘You’re disgusting! Go and cover yourself – I won’t have you walking around half-naked. It’s bad for the servants.’ This is fine talk for a man in a nylon nightie that barely covers his pecker. He pulls sulkily on his shoulder straps and takes a quick shot of brandy.

  ‘She’s a grown woman!’ says Frank, in a sudden rush of exasperation. ‘Why can’t you leave her alone?’ His anger is nothing but shame and guilt and a fear of the pruning knife. He takes a step forward, reaching out with his hand like a man approaching a savage dog.

  ‘Hah! Listen to him!’ cackles Conrad. ‘He interferes with my little girl, breaks my heart and then tells me to mind my own business.’ As he talks his fury plays mischief with his face, pinching his mouth, tweaking his nose, pulling at the hair in his flaring nostrils. His ears seem to soften and swell as if they were made from sealing wax and were ready to melt in fiery splashes against his mottled neck.

  ‘Shut up and go back to bed,’ orders Valentine, trying to keep the two men apart. ‘You look ridiculous. We’ll talk about it in the morning.’

  Conrad pulls back his head and considers her for a moment. ‘No!’ he snorts indignantly. ‘I may feel different in the morning. I’m going to kill him here and now, while I’m still as mad as a magpie.’

  He turns again to Frank, hobbles towards him, hacking at the air with his knife.

  ‘Jesus! Take it easy!’ shouts Frank, jerking away from the whistling blade as it narrowly misses his face. He retreats into the shrubbery but Conrad wades after him, cursing and slashing the moonlight. Rule number four: when you find yourself cornered, never attempt to engage your killer in the art of conversation.

  ‘Stop it!’ screams Valentine. ‘Stop it! If you hurt him, I swear you’ll never see me again! I’ll walk out of here for ever.’

  Conrad gives pause for thought. He shrinks from the attack and turns to his daughter. ‘How can you do this to me?’ he gasps, his face wilting with dismay. ‘How can you do this to your mother? Didn’t we give you everything that money can buy? Didn’t we nurse you through the whooping cough and the measles? Didn’t we give you a fine education? And now you want to break our poor hearts! Why? Why did I work so hard and make such sacrifices if you’re going to squander your chances on the first tuft-hunter who shows you his tongue? Don’t you have any respect for yourself? What would your mother say if she knew that he’d been tampering with you?’

  ‘She’s dead!’ shouts Valentine. ‘My mother is dead!’ Her eyes glitter with hate. The cords stand out in her neck.

  ‘Don’t say that!’ says Conrad, very shocked. ‘Don’t even think it!’ He cringes with pain, his legs bent and his elbows pressed against his belly. ‘She’s alive in this house. She’s alive to me.’

  Frank emerges from the sheltering undergrowth. ‘I’ll leave in the morning,’ he announces quietly. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want this to happen.’

  ‘It’s too late,’ mutters the aggrieved pongo, softly sinking beneath the weight of his misery. ‘I want you gone from here tonight.’ The strength in his legs seems to wither away beneath the ballooning nightdress. ‘Take him!’ he says to Valentine, as he makes his slow descent. ‘Stuff him into the car, drive him down to the river and drown him. I’ll give him twenty-four hours and then I’m coming after him.’ He falls to his knees with a grunt, spilling the brandy bottle, and looks around in confusion.

  ‘Let’s go,’ says Valentine, turning her back on her father.

  ‘Twenty-four hours,’ repeats Conrad, searching for Frank through the fog in his eyes. ‘And when I catch you … I’m going to cut off your balls … poach them in their own gravy – make you swallow them …’ He falls back, driving his heels between his buttocks with such a force that it knocks the blade from his fist. He gropes blindly in search of the knife, sweeping his hands in a circle. But it’s finished. He opens his mouth, gulps at the air and bursts into tears, wrapping his head in his nightie.

  And Webster steps from the darkness, kneels down beside him and gently covers him with a blanket.

  The moon fades in the first grey light of day as the Bentley sweeps through the dirty streets towards the outskirts of Kilburn. The pavements are choked with sacks of rubbish – drunken scarecrows that topple and spill themselves in the gutters. Two women in scuffed leather jackets stand on a corner, staring aimlessly around them, stamping their feet and sipping at cans of export lager. Old men, wrapped in rags and cardboard, are stirring and scratching in stinking doorways. Here and there a few Asian grocers have started unlocking the steel cages protecting their narrow shopfronts. Alarm bells are sounding the cockcrow of dawn.

  Frank sits in the front of the car, wiping his eyes and raking his chin, trying to stay awake. He’s so tired that his head feels weightless, as if it’s floating away from his shoulders. He needs a shave and a clean shirt, a hot bath and a long sleep.’

  ‘Are we going to the cemetery?’ he says, trying to make conversation to push against the silence that has settled between them. They made their escape like a couple of delinquent children, running from the house while Conrad bellowed threats from his bedroom window. But riding through these ugly streets their excitement has quickly been exhausted.

  ‘Have you got a better idea?’ says Valentine and glances nervously into her driving mirror.

  ‘Maybe I should just go home and pretend that none of this ever happened,’ he suggests quietly.

  ‘Thanks a lot!’ bristles Valentine, banging her fist on the steering wheel. ‘I thought I meant something to you.’

  ‘I’m crazy about you,’ he says, trying to stifle a yawn. ‘But you’ll find my passions grow cold when I’m dead.’

  She grins at him over the collar of the fur coat she’s picked for this cold and frosty morning. ‘You can’t go home. Your friend Bassett sent the police over there to look for you.’

  ‘A jealous husband with a fake gun?’ says Frank doubtfully.

  ‘A crazy man with a loaded shooter. You think he knew it was empty? Tell it to the serious crimes squad,’ says Valentine.

  ‘The police went to the house?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I checked.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Simple. I told Webster to send someone out to keep a watch on the street.’

  Frank considers this for a time. He’s a criminal. The way he threatened Bassett, tortured him with a mock execution, not to mention his fight with the Cocker brothers – that must be worth a charge of assault and even attempted murder, although he doubts the owner of the Golden Goose took the trouble to make a report to the police. He imagines
a midnight raid on his house, sledgehammers punching a hole through the door, torchlight on the stairs, marksmen crouched in the privet. His eyes start to shut and his chin sinks slowly against his chest.

  ‘Webster!’ he shouts, jerking awake as Valentine tugs at the wheel to avoid a dog running loose in the street.

  ‘What about Webster?’

  ‘He knows about the cemetery. You told me he found it for you. It’s going to be one of the first hiding places he checks when he comes after me.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll buy him a bag of peppermints. Anyway. A few days. It might not happen.’

  ‘And what about you?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she says, without looking at him.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘It’s time to trust me.’

  I can’t run away for the rest of my life, he thinks, and then wonders if that’s true. For twenty years he’s stubbornly tried to build on the swampland of his career and then marriage and now, watching them sink beneath him, he feels nothing but excitement. He thinks of his father’s escape, cashing the pension plans, taking a ticket as far as New Brunswick, and begins to understand the need to get out and run, to give death a moving target.

  ‘I should at least go back and try to talk to your father,’ he says, as the limousine turns a corner and creeps to the cemetery gates.

  ‘Don’t be stupid. The next time he’ll kill you. Nobody gets a second chance.’

  ‘It’s a mess.’

  ‘Yeah. But it’s not your fault, Frank. It’s bad timing.’

  He steps from the car and walks out to unlock the big iron gates. His breath hangs above his head like a shock of ectoplasm. The sky is filled with thousands of starlings rising from their roosts in the city as they scatter to their feeding grounds in the wastelands and rubbish dumps. The sun casts a low light across the gravestones, sweating the frost from the long grass.

  ‘It’s comfortable and the heating works. I think there’s a TV somewhere. Try looking under the bed,’ Valentine tells him as they open the gatehouse and catch the mouldering, spicy smell of the silent interior. Incense and candles. Flagstones and drains. The smell of solitude. The arched windows scatter spindles of sunlight across the room, revealing the wounds in the battered sofa and the rime of rust on the stove. ‘I was going to have it decorated,’ she adds wistfully, looking around at the dismal walls. In one corner of the room, pressed behind glass in a bamboo frame, a portrait of Christ in long white robes saluting the world as He floats to Heaven. His hair is straight as a sheaf of corn. His blue eyes are staring vacantly from a face as bright as an apricot. Above His head the sky curdles into thunder clouds. Beneath His feet an impression of smoking mountain peaks.

  ‘How long do we have to play hide-and-seek?’ asks Frank, walking as far as the kitchen and searching the shelves. A tin of stale coffee. A packet of salted crackers. A box of brown sugar. An unwrapped block of bitter, black chocolate, cloudy with age, a grey bloom spread like a cataract over its polished surface.

  ‘I don’t know. As long as it takes.’

  ‘There’s no food.’

  ‘You’ll have to starve until I can bring you something.’ Her voice is brittle. Her long hair, slumped against her collar, forms a cowl around her face. She looks tired and lost and frightened.

  ‘I can buy my own groceries,’ he says, reaching out to catch her waist. He draws her against him, scrambles his fingers under her coat, trying to coax a smile.

  ‘Listen, Frank. You’re in big trouble,’ she says, slipping her arms around his neck and leaning away from him slightly to watch his face, to be certain that he’s paying attention. ‘If you’re seen on the streets you’re a dead man. So be careful. Sit tight and keep quiet.’ And she kisses him, long and hard on the mouth, turns abruptly and walks away as if she were leaving for the last time, as if she will never see him again, stepping into the cold bright air and closing the door upon him.

  Conrad slowly opens his eyes, twists his head in the pillow and gazes between the voluptuous thighs of his late beloved wife who hangs suspended above him. Painfully pushing against the blankets that still engulf him in odorous heat, he raises one trembling hand to beckon Dawn down. But she’s doomed to ignore his agony and remains on the wall, smiling at her own breasts. Lost in a swoon, radiant in her nakedness, mocking him with eternal youth. His fingers stretch out for her, begging to know half-forgotten comforts, before his hand sinks away exhausted, strikes against the bedside table and gropes for the bell to call the maid.

  The girl who enters the room is small and thin with bright copper hair that is neatly pinned beneath her cap. She bobs a curtsey at the bed and moves away to open the curtains.

  ‘Who are you?’ grumbles Conrad. He groans, shielding his eyes from the sunlight.

  ‘Geraldine, sir.’ She turns and smiles, anxious for approval, her freckled face very pale, her green eyes fixed upon him, not daring to stray for a moment from her master’s baleful stare.

  ‘Are you new?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Are you willing?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Let me look at your legs.’

  ‘My legs?’ She hesitates and stares at her shoes. She picks at the hem of her uniform and draws it gingerly over her knees.

  ‘Show me the length of ’em, dammit!’ shouts Conrad, annoyed by her timorous ticklings. ‘Are you hiding holes in your stockings?’ And to gain a better view for himself he struggles to haul himself upright by wrestling with a bedpost.

  The maid grows so pale that the freckles fade on the bridge of her nose. Her mouth starts to quiver as if she might scream. But she somehow finds the courage to gather her skirt in her hands and pull it around her waist to let him peer at her narrow thighs and the ribbons on her black suspender belt. There. It’s done. She closes her eyes and attempts to press her thighs shut, afraid that he’ll leap from the bed and lick them.

  ‘Ah!’ He sighs and sinks back into the pillow, his hands retreating under the sheets to fondle his balls absently.

  ‘Will you take some breakfast?’ she begs of him. Standing there, frozen, spindle-shanked, with arms akimbo, she looks like a startled phasma.

  ‘Tell the Turk to make me a glass of cold tomato juice with two raw eggs and plenty of pepper. Can you remember that?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she says, releasing her skirt and making great work of smoothing her apron.

  ‘Good. Bring it to me. And fetch Webster,’ he says and slumps again into stupefaction.

  Webster arrives at the bedside bringing with him the smell of strong soap and a gust of spearmint toothpaste. He stands, silent and very solemn, like a man come to pay his respect to a corpse. He’s wearing an army field jacket and camouflage trousers tucked into a pair of new canvas boots. A wet toothbrush pokes from his pocket.

  ‘Has he gone?’ says Conrad, peering at him with a jaundiced eye.

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘And Valentine?’

  ‘She asked for breakfast to be sent to her room.’

  ‘That girl deserves a good spanking,’ says Conrad. ‘He was a married man! My daughter was running with a married man. Did you know that? What does it mean? The world’s gone crazy! The people have gone crazy! I don’t understand them any more. How can you hope to understand people who walk around the streets in plimsoles, eating Chicken McNuggets and drinking tinned beer? How can you believe in them? It might have been different if Dawn hadn’t demised. A daughter needs to talk to a woman although, God knows, I’ve tried to be a mother to her …’ He punches at the blankets until he unearths a blue satin dressing gown which he throws around his shoulders.

  ‘Children grow,’ sighs Webster. ‘You can’t protect them forever. A lot of girls her age are married with two or three kids.’ He walks to the window, his new canvas boots making little gasping sounds on the carpet of marigolds.

  ‘Bog-trotters, the lot of them!’ shouts Conrad. ‘Verminous rag-pickers! I was born with nothing –
I didn’t climb so high to watch my daughter crawl back to the gutter. She’s beautiful. She’s rich. She has a smatter of education. She’s choice enough for royalty.’

  ‘Remember the old days?’

  ‘What old days?’

  ‘I was thinking of the Tufty Club in Frith Street,’ says Webster. He turns from the windows, hands pushed deep in his trouser pockets, and walks as far as the dressing table, sits down and reviews himself in the mirrors. ‘We used to go down there to look at the girls and watch Freddy Alpino at his private table, drinking champagne and plotting murder. Remember Freddy? They used to call him the Pig. He ran all the rackets in London …’ He pauses, watching Conrad’s reflection in the glass.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘He retired and bought a Greek island.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘He lived like a lord in a stone fortress and tried to debauch all the local girls,’ Webster reminds him. ‘He always loved dark and hairy women,’ he adds, tapping his fingers against the bristles of a silver hair brush.

  ‘He died of the pox!’ growls Conrad. The wages of sin is death. He crawls from the sheets and swings his legs overboard, making the brocade canopy shiver and leak a trickle of dust.

  ‘But when he retired and left town there were gang wars in the streets. Every kid with a blade in his pocket wanted to cut out a patch of turf,’ continues Webster, steering the conversation away from the weaknesses of the flesh. ‘Remember Jungle Johnny from Brixton? We had to have him put away when he tried to come north of the river. And Fat Willie gave us trouble when he wanted a share of the restaurant racket.’